Bruno Latour in Pieces

An Intellectual Biography

Henning Schmidgen and Translated by Gloria Custance

This book will present a user-friendly and definitive introduction to the work of Bruno Latour, including its most recent developments.

Latour is an increasingly central figure in interdisciplinary thinking, especially the thinking that can be associated with the "new materialism" and "posthumanism," though his actor network theory has even wider application.

A monumental work by Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, came out last year from Harvard UP, and that will draw even greater attention to him--and create an even greater need for this book, which takes into account the developments reflected in that work.

Bruno Latour in Pieces

An Intellectual Biography

Henning Schmidgen and Translated by Gloria Custance

Description

Bruno Latour stirs things up. Latour began as a lover of science and technology, co-founder of actor-network theory, and philosopher of a modernity that had "never been modern." In the meantime he is regarded not just as one of the most intelligent and also popular exponents of science studies but also as a major innovator of the social sciences, an exemplary wanderer who walks the line between the sciences and the humanities.

This book provides the first comprehensive overview of the Latourian oeuvre, from his early anthropological studies in Abidjan (Ivory Coast), to influential books like Laboratory Life and Science in Action, and his most recent reflections on an empirical metaphysics of "modes of existence." In the course of this enquiry it becomes
clear that the basic problem to which Latour's work responds is that of social tradition, the transmission of experience and knowledge. What this empirical philosopher constantly grapples with is the complex relationship of knowledge, time, and culture.

An Intellectual Biography

Henning Schmidgen and Translated by Gloria Custance

Table of Contents

1. Exegesis and EthnologyStudies in DijonPéguy's InscriptionsThe Problem of RepetitionExegeses, Re-readings, RevisionsIdeologyThe Production of Lack

2. The Philosopher in the LaboratoryAt the Salk InstituteLaboratory ReportsGuillemin's HistoryHigh-tech, the Beach, and the Post-structuralistsScience as an Agonistic FieldThe Rhetoric of Science

3. Machines of TraditionLaboratory LifeDesks versus MachinesHistory and ConstructionTake from Science the Idea of Science?

4. Pandora and the History of ModernityPandora YearsThe Pasteur Project"Give me a
laboratory"Sociology and Bacteriology

5. Of Actants, Forces, and ThingsActors and ActantsThe Politics of KnowledgeIrreductionismInterlude with ComteA History of Things

6. Science and ActionAn Anthropology of ScienceIn the Hinterland of the TextsGreat Divides, Large NetworksFrom "Immutable Mobiles" to "Centres of Calculation"Media Studies

7. Questions Concerning TechnologyThe Exegesis of ModernityThe Turn to TechnologyHave We Never Been Post-Modern?Technology - A Mode of ExistenceThe Agonistic Field Strikes BackThe Crisis of the Networks